The Endless Indian Trial

In “Court,” a powerful and richly praised new Indian film that is showing in San Francisco this week, the camera has a restful, unblinking gaze. It behaves as if it is filming a documentary, even though the film is a work of fiction. It does not continuously scurry to show faces in close-up or cut away for effect, as one might expect in a courtroom drama. It loves attrition as much as tension. In long, steady shots, it absorbs the unglamorous details of judicial procedure in a single case that unfolds at glutinous pace. The camera’s patience mirrors that of the court, where time appears to be of no consequence at all; a hundred years hence or a thousand, this case may well be trudging along, awaiting a witness or rummaging through its trove of antiquated laws. The film’s stillness and the court’s lack of urgency nearly fool us into forgetting that a man’s freedom is at stake.

That man is Narayan Kamble, a white-bearded folk singer who has been arrested during a matinee performance amid a clutch of tenements in Mumbai. Kamble is ordinarily taciturn, but onstage, after he has been introduced as a “people’s poet,” he is electric with fury. He sings, in Marathi, about the oppressions of class and caste, and bemoans greed and corruption: “Pandemonium is here / Time to rise and revolt / Time to know your enemy.” Kamble is arrested on the charge of abetting the suicide of a sewer cleaner whose body has been pulled out of a manhole. A couple of days earlier, it is alleged, Kamble had performed in the neighborhood and incited sanitation workers to kill themselves in protest of their inhuman working conditions.

“Court” makes clear that the authorities are abusing a moribund judicial process to harass a man who is advocating for change. The prosecution itself is, in a way, the punishment, and through the rest of the movie, its director, Chaitanya Tamhane, a twenty-eight-year-old first-time filmmaker, lays bare some of the deep dysfunctions of the Indian judiciary, beginning with the ponderousness of Indian trials. In a Mumbai courtroom with lethargic ceiling fans and walls of peeling blue paint, Kamble’s case progresses inch by inch. When one hearing ends, the next is scheduled for a month or more later, so that even the presentation of the patently thin evidence against him is stretched out over the course of a year. (He stays in jail throughout, having been denied bail and remanded to judicial custody.)

Tamhane’s film is as much commentary as cinema. India’s courts are indeed choked, with more than thirty-one million open cases awaiting resolution. “If the nation’s judges attacked their backlog nonstop—with no breaks for eating or sleeping—and closed 100 cases every hour, it would take more than 35 years to catch up,” Bloomberg Businessweekcalculated in January. Delays are the defining feature of the system. Cases linger for decades. Infamously, a postal worker was acquitted, in 2013, of the charge of embezzling fifty-eight rupees, a full twenty-nine years after legal proceedings began. Defendants will sometimes try to turn this lassitude to their own advantage, slowing things further still. “Deferment consists of keeping proceedings permanently in their earliest stages,” the painter Titorelli advises Josef K. in Kafka's “The Trial.” “The trial doesn’t stop, but the defendant is almost as certain of avoiding conviction as if he’d been acquitted.”

The logjam has left India’s prisons crowded less with convicts than with inmates who are, like Kamble, awaiting or undergoing trial; two-thirds of India’s four million prisoners are “undertrials,” according to Amnesty International. Last September, the country’s Supreme Court had to direct judicial officers to release undertrials who had already been in prison for more than half of the maximum term that their charges would allow. (A law mandating such releases was already on the books, but had rarely been followed in practice.)

Last July, India’s Law Commission, a government agency, published a report warning that judicial delays were “leading to a dilution of the Constitutional guarantee of access to timely justice and erosion of the rule of law.” The report cited several reasons for this situation. For one, India has no equivalent of the U.S.’s Speedy Trial Act, which sets time limits for the different stages of a federal criminal prosecution. Also, traffic and other ticketed offences that require nothing more than payments of fines nevertheless entail court dates, leading them to comprise a third of pending cases before the lower judiciary.

But primarily, the report concluded, India suffers from a paucity of judges, with roughly fifteen judges for every million people, compared with more than a hundred judges per million in the U.S. The Law Commission report recommended doubling the number of judges and putting the fresh recruits to work first at clearing the backlog, but such appointments can take years; new courtrooms will have to be built for them, and new infrastructure provided. In “Court,” the acerbic Judge Sadavarte, who presides over Kamble’s trial, is one of the circuit’s livelier eminences, packing an average of five hearings into each day. He has clearly learned to accept his lot, though, displaying only the merest flicker of annoyance when a witness fails to appear on the appointed date or when an intelligence report, purportedly crucial to the case against Kamble, turns out to be a month away from completion.

The film also speaks to another sort of judicial reform, often discussed but never acted upon: the revision of old laws and regulations. More than a thousand of India’s laws date back to the British Raj, when a colonial power formulated them to help rule the subcontinent. Tamhane plays these incongruities for mordant laughs. The prosecutor Nutan presents, as evidence of Kamble’s dark designs, the fact that he owns two banned books: Arthur Koestler’s “The Lotus and the Robot” and a Marathi book proscribed soon after its publication in 1899. She also reminds the judge that Kamble had earlier received a warning, under the Dramatic Performances Act, for staging “seditious material.”

Kamble’s lawyer, Vinay Vora, protests the introduction of this precedent. The act is a Victorian law, created in 1876 to shut down theatrical shows that challenged the British, he says. It shouldn’t be relevant to postcolonial India.

“This is not a valid argument,” Nutan responds. “It is a law. It is there.”

The absurdity of some of the accusations against Kamble is compounded by the casual indiscipline of the investigation, which hints at deeper and more malign manipulations of Indian law. Policemen search his house without a warrant; when the prosecution produces a man who claims to have heard Kamble sing the inflammatory song about sewer cleaners, Vora exposes him to be a stock witness who has taken the stand in several cases to lie in support of the police. Toward the end of “Court,” Kamble is set briefly at liberty, but is soon detained again under the baroque ambiguity of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act—a law that was passed in 1967, has been augmented twice in the past decade, and was actually used, in 2011 and 2013, to arrest activists from a theatrical troupe called the Kabir Kala Manch.

In Sadavarte’s courtroom, Nutan reads aloud, in full, this law’s definition of a terrorist act. A poet such as Kamble may be said to have committed terrorism if he has acted “by using bombs, dynamite or other explosive substances or inflammable substances or firearms or other lethal weapons or poisonous or noxious gases or other chemicals or by any other substances (whether biological radioactive, nuclear or otherwise) of a hazardous nature or by any other means of whatever nature.”

Vora almost laughs out loud. “Where is the bomb? Where are the lethal weapons?”

“Or by any other means of whatever nature,” Nutan reminds everyone. That malleable phrase contains a provision for any conspiracy the state wishes to perceive.

Tamhane’s admonitions of India’s judiciary are not delivered clinically; instead, with immense skill, he works them under the skin of his movie, allowing the story to shine. The cast, an assembly of little-known or first-time actors, is a marvel of verisimilitude, and Tamhane fleshes out his characters with loving attention to their lives outside the courtroom. After a hearing, we follow Nutan home on the local train, and we accompany her family into a theatre to watch a Marathi play. Vora wanders around a grocery store, picking out cheeses; he squabbles with his parents when he visits them, and he meets friends for beers at a bar where a singer croons Portuguese love songs. Sadavarte takes a family vacation with a large group of friends, many of whom look up to him with evident respect. Only Kamble is, with great deliberateness, kept beyond the boundaries of our understanding. He remains a cipher, just as he is within the court—an unknowable man with no personal history, trapped in a maze that he cannot fathom.

Why was a new documentary about a brutal rape banned by the Indian government?

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.